Project Experience

Best Practices in Mass Customization Demonstrates Need for New Business Paradigm and Helps Avoid Costly Mistakes

Client Situation
Our client was in process of developing a mass customized nutritional food product through the Internet channel and wanted to better understand the keys to success and the pitfalls with this type of initiative. We identified specific companies who had experience with mass customization in some way and areas of learning that would be valuable to our client.

Fuld Approach
Through conversations with key personnel involved with mass customization efforts at non-competing companies, we aimed to understand the business objectives behind their initiatives, research and marketing testing, marketing strategy, integration of the mass customized product with existing business, IT related issues, the degree to which a new business model needed to be adopted, and the cultural changes that could be required.

Benefits and Implications
We provided our client with direction on how best to develop a mass customized product, the challenges in corporate culture, production, requirements of a successful web-based ordering process and the marketing elements required for such an initiative to be successful.
Our client learned that it had to adopt a new business model for this initiative to be successful and capitalize on synergies where possible. By applying the learning from our efforts, our client could avoid costly mistakes made by others and increase the likelihood of success of its mass customization effort. For more information, contact Michael Sandman at msandman@fuld.com.